Torture
by RobinNightingale
Summary: After who knows how many months of imprisonment, Ryou Bakura is finally free from the Shadow Realm. But is reality really better than the place he just came out of? One shot, contains blood and violence, as well as implied murder. A rant, if you want to squint in that angle, but more of a drabble, just not exactly 100 words.


**RN:** I scare myself sometimes.

* * *

_Torture._

In Bakura's mind, that was the only coherent word he could think of.

_Torture. Torture. Torture._

It summed up the entire experience quite nicely, actually. All of those sleepless nights, the anxiety, the fear, the pain, the sickness, the overwhelming guilt as each of his loved ones one by one fell prey to the spirit of the Millennium Ring, all of it packaged into that one little gut-wrenching word.

Torture.

_Torture._

_Torturetorturetorturetorturetorturetorturetorturetorturetorturetorturetorturetorturetorturetorturetorture—_

_STOP!_

Bakura's eyes flew open. Or rather, stayed closed. In all honesty, it didn't matter in the Shadow Realm.

In his mind, he wearily looked around through half-lidded eyes. What met them was the same image each time he regained a little bit more consciousness.

Wails of agony that swelled and ebbed all around him. And around him were shadows. Dark, chaotic, screaming shadows that formed split-second shapes then crumbled back into smoke. Deformed faces with mouths stretched unnaturally wide. Monsters that snapped their teeth and lolled their tongues. Instruments of pain, jabbing at him from every angle.

He was floating, yet he felt like he was standing. Certainly his feet were slipping and sliding across _something_. It smelled sickeningly like blood. Something else was holding his arms up at the wrists so that he hung from his bonds and his legs flopped beneath him.

_Help me_, the tiny shred of Ryou Bakura that was still sane begged. _Help…_

No one would help. No one had come to help him in the entirety he had been trapped here.

Here? There was a here, wasn't there…And where ever here was, he didn't want to be here.

_Get me out of here!_

If there was a here, there was a somewhere else. And anywhere was better than this. If he were asked, he would have said he was surprised at himself. He had not fought like this in a long time. But for whatever reason, his body was making one final, desperate attempt at freedom. He lunged upwards…

And suddenly, just like that, he was out.

He panted harshly, his eyes wide but not making out what was before him. His body was frozen, paralyzed, and it felt _so _unnatural. He wanted to move, but he couldn't, he simply_ couldn't_, and it was terrifying, for he knew that if he remained there any longer he would be violently thrown back into the dismal prison he had just escaped. His breathing grew shorter, and he was gasping, choking on his fear.

_Move!_ he pleaded. _Just move anything! Anything! It doesn't matter, just move!_

With the greatest amount of effort he had ever taken, he managed to slowly drag his finger into a curl.

With that, his paralysis crumbled, and he collapsed to the side, trembling. He weakly clutched the covers of his bed closer to his chest as he sobbed, or tried to sob, the energy to do so having depleted long ago.

One of his hands somehow found its way to his mouth. As he slowly pushed himself to a sitting position, his stomach lurched, and he struggled to keep its contents inside. If there were any contents to speak of, that is. Whatever was left, they were spilling up his throat, onto his tongue, and he gagged. Little strands of drool leaked out from the palm still clamped over his mouth and dripped slowly on the cloth.

And Bakura rejoiced, for these were material things. In his mind, physical sensations had no place, except those akin to excruciating pain. The shadows toyed mostly with his emotions and his sanity, stripping him down bit by bit until whatever was left knew only the torture. The simple feeling of nausea grounded him, proof that this was indeed reality, not some hallucination whipped up by whatever being was paining him that day.

For the first time in…

Oh, he'd certainly lost count by now. He didn't even bother trying to keep track anymore of how much time would pass during his blackouts. Sometimes only a few minutes would zip by and he'd be in a store with no memory of having walked there, or he would take his first breath of fresh air after what felt like centuries of imprisonment and find that three weeks had gone by, all without him noticing what had occurred or knowing what he had done.

But he was out, for the first time in a long time. After suffocating in the putrid, writhing, stabbing bowels of the Shadow Realm, he was in control of his own body.

A smirk, sharp as the knife which lay before him at the foot of the bed.

'_Control. Ha._'

Bakura's trembling stilled, and dread threatened to send him tumbling back into the darkness from which he had just surfaced. Frightened, quivering masses of gelatin (how could he call them eyes, when he no longer used them to see on his own?) squeezed shut, and his other hand fell upon his head to grip his hair. And now the sobs he had been begging for before, the ones he thought would give him relief, wracked his body in hopelessness.

The voice came again. '_What are you doing out, maggot? I thought I told you to go to the Shadow Realm and stay there until I called for you._'

"Leave me alone," Bakura whispered.

Red eyes narrowed in the shadows, and the spirit stalked forward. Though it shouldn't have been possible, one chalk-white hand shot out and seized a fistful of hair, yanking the unfortunate boy's head upwards. Bakura cried out at the sharpness of it, and he scrabbled fruitlessly at the spirit's hold.

The spirit leaned forward until he was right next to Bakura's ear. "After all this time, you actually bring up the nerve to try and tell me what to do?" he hissed.

"P-please," Bakura wept, his tears mingling with the snot and drool that dripped down his mouth. "J-just go, please…Th-there's n-nothing else you c-could use me f-for…I-I can't t-take it anym-more…"

"Insolent _slug!_" The spirit slammed Bakura's head into the dresser by his bed and walked away. Bakura fell to his covers again, clutching his wound with both hands. He could feel blood trickling through his hair, some of it dripping into his ear and down his face…but when he drew his hand away, he saw to his shock that his hand was clean.

The spirit reached into his shirt and withdrew the Millennium Ring. "I'm sending you back to Hell to rot," he snarled.

"_NO!_" Bakura shrieked, suddenly curling into a tight ball. His hands flew to his temples, as if trying to grab a hold of his mind and keep it in the real world.

"_Don't send me back there!_" the boy begged. "_I can't…I won't last…I don't want to go back there, please don't send me back there, please don't send me back, please, please—_"

The stream of babble was cut off when the spirit suddenly kicked his host off the bed, his face twisted into a sour grimace. Bakura merely resumed his position, whimpering, waiting for the inevitable moment when he would be cast again to the back of his own mind.

The spirit tched. The host's pathetic pleas were fouling his mood for torture. It wasn't nearly as fun to bring Hell on someone already broken. He thrust the Ring back under his shirt and grabbed the knife from the bed instead. He roughly hoisted up his host by the collar of his shirt and held the blade against his neck.

"Then would you rather stay out here, with me?" the spirit growled.

The boy struggled weakly in his grip, and the spirit pressed the blade closer, slicing a few layers of skin. A malicious smirk drew the spirit's lips upwards, and his voice softened to a purr. "You know, sending you to the Shadow Realm is a kindness, really. In there, I can't touch you. And believe me, those Shadows are _nothing_ compared to what I'm capable of."

There was a measure of falsehood to those words. There was a reason the spirit never took Bakura to the shadows himself; not even he wished to experience those soul-devouring hells. But what he couldn't match in mind games, he more than made up for in physical torture. In the end, it all boiled down to which version of pain Bakura could stand less of, really.

Bakura didn't answer, his eyes directed downwards as much as he could to the knife still held against his neck. The spirit's smirk melted, and with a frustrated snarl he released his host. Bakura gasped and clapped his hand to the wound, but when he lowered his hand, he saw again that there was no blood.

He slowly dragged himself into a sitting position. "What are you going to do to me this time?" he asked hoarsely.

In response, the spirit flung something at him. Bakura ducked just in time, and whatever it was flew an inch over his head to thud heavily against the far wall. When Bakura looked, he saw his digital alarm clock, its stone edges chipped from the impact.

He swallowed. If that had hit him...

The spirit gave a short sigh as he flopped into the armchair in the corner and put his feet up on the desk next to it. "Luckily for you, I'm weary for the night. It was a rather eventful evening, you might say, and I suppose I've had my fill of blood for now."

As he spoke, he brandished the knife at his host, and for the first time, Bakura caught a glimpse of the rusty material encrusting the tip and handle.

He looked down, and the same knife was in his hands, and he saw clearly that it was dried blood, still red and sticky in some spots but turning brown and rough as time ticked on.

Bakura checked himself, but he could find no fresh wounds, even with the abuse he had just endured. The blood, then, was someone else's.

But who's...?

The old guilt slid slowly into his heart, as heavy as the day he visited the spirit's first victim in the hospital, and he lifted his gaze to the spirit.

"What did you do?" he whispered.

The spirit, who had closed his eyes, opened them at his host's question. His smile of pleasure confirmed Bakura's fears; someone had been hurt.

"You know, it astonishes me that you still have the room to care about somebody else," the spirit chuckled. He caressed the edge of the blade, holding it up to the light so that the blood glowed. "It's really nothing you have be worried about. You didn't know her, and if you want my opinion, the world's much smarter without her."

Bakura paled, and his stomach threatened to overturn again. Dry-mouthed, he asked faintly, "Who…Who did you…?"

The spirit laughed heartily at his horrified expression and righted himself to face Bakura directly. "I take it back; this is _much_ more fun than keeping you locked up," he sniggered. He gave a nonchalant shrug, carelessly twirling the blade between his fingers. "Well, if it matters that much to you, I'll tell you."

A cruel light glinted in the depths. "But really, you shouldn't be so bothered…"

The knife stopped blade up, and he pointed it at Bakura. His lips curled up to show fangs.

"…_about the life of a simple elementary schoolgirl_."

_Snap!_

Bakura's breath hitched, and for an instant he could have been declared well and truly dead. For as the spirit's laughter echoed all around, he grew cold and still as death, and his mind shattered into nothingness. Even his heart jolted to a stop, and his chest didn't move for several seconds.

_A child…_

_He murdered a child…_

And in that instant, he could have sworn he saw the girl's body lying prostrate in the middle of the room. Her cap and bag, as pristine as when her mother gave them to her that morning, were still on her person. Her shoes, red and new, still untainted by mud, were set perfectly upon her feet. Only her uniform gave any indication that she was dead. The wound was not visible, yet at the very edge of her belly the cloth was ripped and red. The girl's face was turned towards him, eyes grey and lifeless, a trickle of crimson pooling at her mouth.

Finally Bakura screamed, and as he did so, he felt chains suddenly tighten around his limbs and chest. He turned behind him and saw a great gaping mouth, red and glistening with stinking saliva, getting closer and closer. Bakura shouted, struggled, and darted his terrified gaze back and forth between the dead girl and the monstrous mouth, where there was no bottom, only an endless chorus of wails.

With a final shriek, the mouth snapped shut, and both the great beast and the girl melted away into the shadows. When they cleared, Bakura was nowhere to be seen.

All the while the spirit laughed, once again the sole possessor of Bakura's body and the Millennium Ring.

* * *

**RN:** So, there's been something I've been wanting to say about this, and it's sort of an explanation.

I've found a lot of stories that depict Ryou Bakura and the spirit of the Ring interacting together, and some of them are pretty good. But I couldn't help noticing a trend.

Yami Bakura always seems to be written as some sort of anti-hero, a dark figure who's merely troubled with the genocide of his hometown. And I guess to some that seems justifiable, and makes the spirit to be some sort of tragic figure.

But I say the bare-bottom of it is he's a murderous, power-hungry psychopath.

I loved Yami Bakura. In fact, he was probably he most fascinating character in the whole Yu-Gi-Oh! franchise. But often I had to remind myself that I was rooting for the one who wanted to KILL all of the protagonists. Maybe even maim and torture along the way. It never really made sense that Ryou would ever feel sympathetic for the dark spirit. In a way, I guess this is just making myself feel better about the whole thing. But come on, people.

The spirit's a PARASITE.

I guess I never really got how people could so easily ignore that part.

So I wrote this as my part to display a little bit of what puts the 'Yami' in 'Yami Bakura'.

This isn't a preaching session, and I definitely am not the expert about this stuff. On top of that, I know I'm talking about made-up characters.

But I'm very compelled to say this, dear readers. Don't be bewitched by the power and and smooth confidence. In the end, you only get hurt. Stay safe, make good choices, and I love you all :).

Oh, and disclaimer. Don't own Yu-Gi-Oh!, and all that.


End file.
